


the sky turned pink while you were gone

by cmajorchords



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drabble Collection, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-09-17 16:04:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9332663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmajorchords/pseuds/cmajorchords
Summary: Amy Santiago is an art forger, and Jake Peralta is (not) a contract killer. Criminals!AU





	1. from the castle on the hill

**Author's Note:**

> drabble series, so will be updated sporadically. title is a mangled quote from hypnotized, by astronomyy.

The first thing Jacob Peralta ever says to Amy Santiago is, “I’m not a contract killer.”

Santiago had replied, “And yet I’m hiring you anyway,” and that was really the beginning of everything.

 

i. from the castle on the hill

The thing about living on the run from life and everyone he’d ever known and all the consequences that come from such, is that it gets lonely. Jake is not one to admit to weakness, but if he had to - if someone forced him to - this would be the first. Loneliness is not an open wound, bleeding out, that he can tie up with a tourniquet, nice and easy and neat, treat with antibiotics and medicine and copious amounts of stolen first aid supplies from that time he’d raided a hospital after it became clear bleeding out was going to be a regular feature in his life. No; loneliness is an ache in his neck after a long day spent staring at blank walls, the muscle fatigue after rappelling up the outside of a building, the million tiny wounds stinging up his hands and crippling his body and rendering him useless, completely useless. It doesn’t go away, only gets driven further back into his head when other things take priority, only to be resurrected at the end of the day, when sleep is a faraway, elusive sort of thing.

Occasionally, he thinks it might also be depression, and also that he should probably book himself a therapy session or two. He could use his one or a million of those fake IDs he has lying around. He could use the money he’d gotten from that last job with the Lanucci brothers. He could - 

And at the end of the day, when sleep is a faraway, elusive sort of thing, he only turns over on his mattress and reaches for the bottle of sleeping pills, always on hand on top of the overturned cardboard box that serves as his nightstand. 

But then he meets Amy; and now, when he can’t sleep for the nightmares that play like a broken record even when his eyes aren’t closed, he goes outside and heads up onto the rooftop of the smallish abandoned factory that has served for their hideout for about five months and thus can only remain as such for one more month, and finds Amy. 

She is probably the only person he knows that sleeps less than he does, and so this means she can always be counted upon to be awake on the roof when he needs her to be. Tonight, there are two half-smoked cigarettes on the concrete by her feet, and also an open can of beer on her other side. 

He stops, two feet short of her back. From here, she looks very small, hunched over her knees and balanced at the edge of the world. The factory isn’t very high, but Belfast, Maine, where they’ve been hiding out low after their last job had nearly blown up in their faces, is a small town. Even from this ridiculously terrible vantage point, they can practically see the whole thing. 

He says, “Santiago -”

“If you’re going to join me, you have to smoke a minimum of one cigarette, and finish this beer for me,” Amy says. 

Jake pauses for a minute, and then steps up to sit down beside her. His legs dangle precariously over the edge, and he holds out a hand; Amy deposits the requisite materials into his palm. 

The condensation around the can has mostly wiped off by now, and Jake wonders how long Amy’s been up here, drinking alone. He absently drinks a mouthful of lukewarm beer, and leans over so that Amy can light his cigarette with a crappy disposable lighter. “Double dose of shame cigarettes,” he comments. “To what do you owe that pleasure?”

She grunts a little in response, and tucks one side of her hair behind an ear. She straightens her sleeve, and then says, “I’m getting very bored of sitting out here and doing nothing.”

“This was your idea,” Jake points out. “I was all for claiming that job with the guy’s stolen landscape painting, or whatever - ”

“That was a priceless Rembrandt,” Amy snaps, which pleases Jake immensely. She’d looked too unlike herself, still and small in the backdrop of a rising sun. At least like this, her shoulders resemble something he can recognize more easily. “And our faces were already all over the papers. That job wouldn’t have gone down well, you know that.”

“I don’t think five months are going to make a difference in whether or not our faces are public knowledge.”

“No,” Amy sighs, “but at least we’ve tried, right?”

Jake looks out over the horizon and tries to imagine the rest of his life, lying low, stuck in a podunk town in the middle of nowhere. It would be a long, peaceful life. Jake hates it already, and he’s only been living it five months.

“I’m going to go look up job listings tonight, I think,” he decides. His cigarette tapers out into ash in his hand; both him and Amy look down at it consideringly, for a second. 

Amy asks, “Is there any point in telling you no?”

Instead of replying, he asks, “What are you going to do when this is over?”

“When we leave Belfast?”

“No.” Jake shakes his head, slowly. He’d been twenty-four when Amy had first hired him, for one job only, that had then led into another, then another, and then finally this fifty-fifty partnership eight years later in which, strangely, the only person he can trust is someone it’s been repeatedly beaten into his head not to. In their line of work, trust is a foreign concept, but here, it’s kept him alive. He knows more about Amy Santiago than the rest of the world does about their mother or their brother, and yet he knows nothing at all, because - 

“Will you go home? I don’t even know where you lived. I don’t even know if you have family.”

Amy’s fingers twitch. Jake can tell she’s considering a third cigarette.

After a long pause, Jake stands up. “I’ll be downstairs,” he says vaguely, and throws the beer into the trash on his way down.


	2. the roof is caving

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> santiago gets shot, and jake doesn't go crazy, surprisingly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from shelter, by machineheart. alternatively, i really think that the song make me feel better by wistful is really a very good representation of where i want to take this series, albeit very slowly. sorry for the long absence, i kind of forgot how to write fanfiction.

ii. the roof is caving

By morning, Jake’s found exactly what he’d been looking for: a museum in Boston, a painting that had recently been stolen and needed replacing, reward money of upwards of five million. A third party willing to pay to have it replaced. Crime preys on the truly desperate, and art forgery is no exception. 

“Vermeer?” he asks cautiously, when Amy returns downstairs just after sunup. 

“Send it along,” Amy says, and heads down the empty hall. A bare minute later, he can smell the turpentine, and he smiles.

When the two of them are at the top of the game, they are the ones stealing and then dealing, not the ones facilitating a return. But it’s jobs like these - easy, simple, check-the-box-and-now-you’re-done, that are the most therapeutic. There is no adrenaline, no thinking required. It’s perfect, if you’re strapped for cash once in a while and don’t want to have to work too hard to get it.

And when the two of them are not - 

When things go wrong - 

When the alarm explodes and his heart explodes and he cannot, will not run away again - 

“You need a hospital,” he says, feels the truth of the words pulsing against his head in the same rhythm as Amy Santiago’s blood, pulsing against his palms. 

Amy coughs something that sounds distinctly uncomplimentary towards his current state of mind. But she also coughs up a dark red wad of blood, which certainly takes precedence over any verbal sparring to be had. 

“No, really,” he says, trying to be more insistent about it. Amy’s always been better at being bossy. “You’re - you’re probably bleeding out. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Amy, please -”

“No hospital,” she chokes out. 

Jake presses down harder, making her wince. He’d dug the bullet out of her stomach himself, only moments ago, and he doesn’t know what else to do. On the dirty floor of their abandoned warehouse are spread the remains of their pilfered, sorely lacking stash of first aid equipment - barely enough bandages, antiseptic meant for paper cuts and grazes and not bullet wounds, pills to calm inflammation and stave off infection but he doesn't know if it’s enough. He doesn’t know if he can do enough. 

“Just - pressure,” Amy tells him, even as her eyes begin to roll into the back of her head. “I’ll be - fine.”

And then she falls unconscious. 

And she keeps bleeding. 

The bleeding isn’t going to stop of its own accord, so Jake bites down on his lip hard enough to begin to bleed as well, and sets to work. He uses Amy’s cigarette lighter to burn a sewing needle before threading it through with alcohol-doused thread, sews her flesh up, applies the topical antiseptic, wraps her up in all the bandages. 

She isn’t going to die tonight. 

She might die tomorrow, if infection sets in. Or the day afterwards, if there’s more internal damage than he’d realized and she bleeds out from the inside out anyway. Or a week from now, when the police or Interpol or whoever they’ve pissed off this time find their warehouse and blow them up. But she isn’t going to die tonight, and that’s - that has to be enough for him, this time. 

Jake leans back, his hands still shaking, his legs still numb, and wonders how exactly a twenty-something young woman who is intelligent and talented and well-educated could possibly have found herself in this kind of situation. 

Amy Santiago wakes up two days later, which is two days later than he’d really wanted. She fights her way out of the blanket he’d covered her with - they have no mattress, he would’ve gone out and bought one but he hadn’t wanted to leave her alone and mortally wounded - and says, “Peralta?”

“I’ve had my hands inside your gut,” he informs her, feigning offence. “You can call me by my first name without the world crumbling, you know.”

Amy makes a sound like she’s trying to laugh, and it turns out more like a grimace instead. Jake’s heart skips a beat when she attempts to struggle upright, but he stops himself from going to push her back down. She’s not a child. She knows how to take care of herself. 

“Could I have - water?”

He goes to get some for her. She makes a face at the taste of it, probably because it’s been stowed in that bottle for over a week, but she drinks half of it in a breath anyway. He watches her drink, and takes the bottle back when she’s done. 

“You know,” Jake says, trying for lightness, “we have a hundred and one identities we could use. We could've gone to the hospital. I mean, we don’t have insurance, but really, what’s one more little crime in the face of -” He stops at the expression on her face. 

“I -” She hesitates. Her hair is matted with sweat around her too-pale face, greyish skin under her eyes. He should feel bad for being like this when it’s obvious she cannot defend herself, but he doesn’t. He won’t let himself feel it. 

They’ve been working together for eight years. And if Santiago still wants to keep her secrets, then, well, there’s really not much he can do. 

And then she says, “I watched three people I loved die in a hospital.”

Jake works to keep his expression blank and impassive. It’s really not easy. “Oh,” he says, wondering if he’s allowed to ask for more.

“Yes.” She pauses, coughs a little bit more. At least she’s not coughing blood anymore. There are hundreds of other things he has to worry about, like the wound in her gut opening up again, like lasting damage, like whether not like she’ll be able to run and jump and laugh like she used to, but - she’s not coughing blood anymore, and that’s something. “I - both of my parents. And then my little brother.”

“I’m - sorry,” he says, trying for neutrality. 

Amy continues, “It was a car accident. I was in the car, too. Except I didn’t - I didn’t die. They said I was lucky.”

Jake swallows. “My dad’s dead, too. He’s - he was a pilot. Plane crash, over the Alps.”

Amy exhales, heavily. Jake sits down next to her, quietly, resists the urge to fluff up the hoodie he’d placed beneath her head as a makeshift pillow. He brings the bottle of water to his lips, and then immediately regrets the decision. “This tastes terrible,” he spits, and stares at her. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Amy Santiago laughs. It’s the best thing he’s ever heard in his life.


End file.
